Squeezing cold cash out of three "hot" juices

Can drinking fruit juice boost your energy and physical performance? Make your cancer disappear? Help you cheat death?

Hundreds of thousands of people would like you to believe that ... so you'll pay $35 or $40 a bottle for the noni or mangosteen juice they sell over the Internet or to their friends. And claims on the Web and in magazine ads have fueled the sale of pomegranate juice in supermarkets and health food stores across the country.

Are these three juices "super," or just a super opportunity for a lot of people to make a lot of money?

Mangosteen

For hundreds of years, people in Singapore, Malaysia, India, and China have been using the fruit and the bark of the mangosteen tree to treat diarrhea and eczema. These days, mangosteen juice is as likely to turn up in New York or Los Angeles as in Kuala Lumpur.

Why all the interest in an obscure tropical fruit? You can thank (or blame) a group of marketers who had already successfully helped flog the juice of another little known tropical fruit, noni, to American consumers (see p. 10).

Mangosteen is sold through an aggressive worldwide multi-level marketing network in which 350,000 sellers--who put up a Web site or talk up the juice to their friends and family--recruit other sellers and collect commissions from them.

At the top of the pyramid is a Utah company called XanGo, which started marketing mangosteen juice mixed with nine other fruit juices in 2002. At $35 for a 25-ounce bottle, it's easy to see why sales have soared from $40 million in 2002 to $200 million in 2005.

Why Drink It?

Mangosteens contain xanthones, which are antioxidants "that may help maintain intestinal health, strengthen the immune system, neutralize free radicals, help support cartilage and joint function, and promote a healthy seasonal respiratory system," according to XanGo. (All are "structure or function" claims. Since they don't mention a disease, they're legal even though there may be no evidence.)

Local mangosteen juice sellers, further down the commission chain, aren't as modest. For example, according to lovemangosteen.net and mangosteeneffect.com--Web sites created by XanGo dealers in Nebraska and Colorado--"Nature's Amazing Medicine Chest" helps cure cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, migraine headaches, depression, and a host of other diseases.

"I used to get three to four severe migraines a month," Brett T. writes on lovemangosteen.net. "I have grown up watching my mother suffer from these same migraines ... Two months ago I was told about a product called Mangosteen Juice. Ever since then [neither] I NOR my mother have had a single episode."

"Why use a medicine if a food can do the same thing?" lovemango steen.net asks visitors.

The Evidence

"This fruit has more science to back up its health claims than many pharmaceutical drugs on the market!" says jack.gomangosteen.net.

The company that "jack" is distributing for is a bit more cautious.

"There's emerging evidence that mangosteen has anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and anti-microbial properties," says David Morton, a University of Utah anatomist who is scientific advisor to XanGo. (Two of Morton's brothers helped start the company.)

Mangosteen, like most plants, has evolved an arsenal of chemicals to protect itself against predators and environmental stresses.

"But most of the stuff from plants that shows early promise in the lab doesn't pan out in humans," cautions University of Hawaii ethnobotanist Will McClatchey.

"All of the science on mangosteen is still very early," Morton admits. He can point to only one study in humans. "It was done in a Singapore hospital in 1932 to treat dysentery," he says. Mangosteen mixed with a drug was slightly more effective than the drug alone.

"I don't think there are plans to study mangosteen in humans in the near future," adds Morton, because "there's much too much that still needs to be studied in the lab."

So much for "more science than many pharmaceutical drugs."

Noni

Noni (pronounced NO-knee) is a lime-green fruit the size of a small potato that grows in tropical Asia and on islands in the Pacific, including Hawaii. It was virtually unknown in the United States until 1996, when a Utah company, Morinda, Inc. (now called Tahitian Noni International), started selling it as a dietary supplement.

Noni's taste--and price--take some getting used to.

People say it's like consuming rotten cheese or old prune juice and that it smells like vomit or dirty feet. To make noni juice more palatable, manufacturers mix it with grape and blueberry juices.

Tahitian Noni sells the leading brand for $42. That buys a 32-ounce bottle--enough to last a month if you drink one ounce a day (the label recommends one to three ounces). In 10 years, the company says that it has sold more than $2 billion worth of noni juice through its multi-level marketing network.